Dating (Social customs) -- Juvenile fiction; Friendship -- Juvenile fiction; Young women -- Social life and customs -- Juvenile fiction
Marjorie could not reply. The girl had reached the steps and was now
composedly mounting them. She paid no more attention to the group on the
steps than if they had not been there. She made an authoritative motion
to the taxicab driver to place her bag on the veranda floor beside the
door. She found the bell and rang it, looking even more bored.
As the stranger’s fingers pressed the electric button Miss Remson
stepped to her side. “I am Miss Remson, the manager of Wayland Hall.
What can I do for you?” she asked courteously.
“Oh, are you Miss Remson?” She regarded the brisk, little woman with
indolent blue-green eyes. Her sweet, indifferent drawl went perfectly
with her unconcerned appearance. “I am Miss Monroe. You have my father’s
correspondence. I am here a trifle earlier than he mentioned in his
letter to you. That need not signify,” she added carelessly.
Careful not to intrude the Five Travelers had moved on down the steps
and away from the Hall. Vera had parked the car farther down the drive.
“What a perfectly beautiful girl!” Marjorie softly exclaimed when they
got out of earshot of the Hall.
A murmur of agreement answered her.
“I suppose she’s a would-be,” speculated Vera. “Still, she can’t be.
Miss Remson said yesterday that she didn’t intend to take any would-be’s
until the week before the entrance exams. Then, only those who had
applied for board at Wayland Hall. She never takes stray would-be’s.”
“Whoever she may be, she comes from afar,” informed Leila shrewdly. “Her
traveling bag is English, via Paris. She has the bored air of the
English, but, set me down in the streets of Paris, and I’ll soon be at
the shop which furnished her hat and coat. If it is not one in the Rue
de la Pais called L’harmonie, then I am no witch woman. The latest color
plates they sent me show a coat like that gray.”
“Perhaps she is a friend of Miss Remson’s,” was Kathie’s suggestion.
As the five had not heard the brief exchange of words between the
stranger and the manager they impersonally concurred with Kathie. Again
hustled into the roadster by Vera they soon dropped the subject of the
beautiful arrival at the Hall for the more personal one of Miss
Susanna’s gracious and unlooked-for help in the dormitory project.
Meanwhile, at Wayland Hall, Miss Monroe of London and Paris was lounging
gracefully in a roomy willow rocker in the living room. She was
appraising her surroundings through two limpid, but distinctly shrewd
blue-green eyes and mentally ticketing them “not half bad.”
In her office Miss Remson was frowning as she industriously consulted
her letter file for the desired correspondence. The perturbed manager
was very certain that she had not agreed to admit Miss Monroe, or any
other strange young woman, to Wayland Hall in the middle of the summer.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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